


Project 880

by twitchtipthegnawer



Category: Avatar (2009)
Genre: Aliens, Mind Meld, Original Character(s), Original Female Character - Freeform, Original Male Character - Freeform, Other, Tags May Change, Xenophilia, trying to fix ableism and racism in stories i love
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-06-07
Updated: 2015-06-10
Packaged: 2018-04-03 06:10:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,534
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4089964
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/twitchtipthegnawer/pseuds/twitchtipthegnawer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The story of Avatar told a little more in depth. I basically watched the movie several times and decided I wanted to know what happened during those three months Jake spent on Pandora. Expect tags to change as the story continues.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Earth

**Author's Note:**

> Hi there! I'm in desperate need of critiques for this story. I'm not able bodied but I'm also not wheelchair bound and I desperately want this story to be better about ableism than the original movie. At the beginning Jake will have internalized issues, but I hope to have him work through them. Thank you to everyone who comments or leaves kudos, you're the reason I write!

The noise of the crowd around him pounded on Jake's ears until they ached, the sound of a thousand conversations muttered into phones and a hundred maglev trains whispering above him providing a relentless backdrop to the words echoing in his head.

"I'm sorry, but there's nothing we can do. Unless you pay the fee up front, you're going to have to wait for a slot to open up-" Jake shut his eyes, as though it could block out the memory of the words. The bastard at the front desk didn't know what it felt like, had no idea how frustrating it could be to look around you and see everything from waist height.

A loud ding shook Jake out of his thoughts, and he opened his eyes to see the street in front of him shifting colors, a little walking icon in his periphery letting him know it was safe to move. Jake grimly set his wheels rolling, his arms thick with the muscle of carrying his body around. On every side of him were people hurrying about, many of their faces obscured by the filter masks that spared them the stench of pollution. Jake could taste it on his tongue, the heavy metallic scent reminiscent of blood that had been left out to dry in the hot sun.

It wasn't far to Jake's apartment building from the hospital. It was a crappy place, run down and on the lowest level of the city, but at least it was in the middle of everything, not more than a five minute trip from the few shops and bars Jake frequented. He rolled into the lobby of the building, the automatic doors rattling slightly as they closed behind him. The air inside wasn't much cleaner, but it was sweeter, artificial air freshener hanging like mist. The lobby itself was nearly deserted; the building was mostly full of army vets, like Jake, and most of them had already left for the night. They were probably arriving to the nearby bars now, already downing drink after drink.

Remembering the taste of bitter coffee in the back of his throat when he had swallowed at the nurse's words, Jake knew he would be one of the last back tonight.

The trip to his room was quiet, except for the groan of the elevator as it went up the three measly floors to Jake's apartment, taking its sweet time. When the doors finally opened on the dingy hallway with its burned out fluorescent lights, Jake took a deep breath and pushed out, wheeling himself to his door and unlocking it as quickly as he could without risking dropping his keys. The dark of his tiny, cramped apartment was welcome after the garish lights outside, and Jake found his face relaxing a bit from its grim set.

Jake clicked on the TV as he passed it on his way to the bed, picking up a slightly more comfortable outfit on the way. The pale light of the screen illuminated him as he hopped onto the bed and pulled off his shirt, cursing himself for thinking that looking slightly more professional might have made a difference in the way the nurses at the hospital would look at him. Of course it hadn’t; it never did. He left the collared shirt crumpled at the foot of the bed and tossed his t-shirt on, then glared daggers at the sweatpants in front of him. It wasn’t that putting the pants on was hard, per se, but it took so long compared to how it used to that it always left Jake frustrated.

Tonight was worse than usual. In the background a peppy woman’s voice prattled on about the newest cloning success, the positivity she was exuding only serving to make Jake’s mood gloomier. “The Bengal tiger, extinct for over a century, is making a comeback,” she said, a forced smile as plain in her tone as it would have been on Jake’s face if he bothered to pretend to smile anymore. “These cloned tigers at the Beijing zoo...” Jake tuned out the rest of what the woman was saying, allowing her to become background noise the same way the thousand conversations on the street had. Cloned extinct animals had been news last year, full of all the excitement and mystique that a chance at fixing the planet always had. Now, they only made Jake’s stomach feel heavy. A full year and nothing had really changed, had it? How many more years would it take for these cloned balls of fluff to make a difference, he wondered.

When the worn soft jeans were finally on legs Jake couldn’t feel, he leaned back against the wall his bed was pushed flush to and let his gaze fall blankly on the screen in front of him. There were the famous cubs, suckling fabricated milk from plastic bottles held by human hands. Jake snorted and clicked the TV off, letting darkness fall on him again. He allowed his head to tip forward, so he was staring at his legs instead of the blank wall, almost normal looking beneath the layer of thick fabric. If they didn’t hang so limply, or weren’t quite so numb, he might have been able to convince himself they could still work. Jake shut his eyes and shook his head slowly. No, he couldn’t have.

Jake didn’t often think about the injury that had ended his career. There was no reason to, not when there was nothing he could do about it. But the day had been hard, and the rejection still stung in the small of his back like the faintest memory of pain. He couldn’t help but think of himself crouching in a Venezuelan city, so similar to his own but for the language of the advertisements, his heart pounding with adrenaline. He had wanted hardship, something to prove to his family that he was stronger than he looked, something to prove to himself that he was stronger than he felt. Well, he had gotten what he’d asked for, hadn’t he? A dark laugh bubbled out of him at the thought, and his hands hit the bed, forcing him to sit up again.

He reached for his wheelchair, pulling it closer to him and hopping in. He hauled his legs after him, still heavy despite the atrophy that ate away at them like acid, and set off for the nearest bar. It was a dive, and always seemed to smell like vomit and cheap, fake fruit flavoring, but it was familiar, and if you were drunk enough you wouldn’t notice the smell anyway.

The doorway to the deceptively named Bridge Cafe was always open, and the bouncer that stood at it nodded at Jake with a friendly smile when Jake approached its brick facade. Jake recognized the man, but couldn’t place a name to his face, probably due to the copious amounts of alcohol that were usually in his system when he spoke to him. Tonight, he reflected with a feeling of almost vicious relish, would be no different.

A chorus of “Hey!” and “Jake!” greeted him when the other vets in the bar recognized him. A green prosthetic arm waved at him from across the room, and a grin that was barely more than bared teeth broke over Jake’s face as he waved back and headed to his usual drinking buddies. The music in the bar was loud, and obnoxious, and nothing at all like the painful pounding drum beats of the happy woman’s voice on his TV.

The crowd was easy to navigate after so many months of practice. In a minute flat Jake had maneuvered his way to the back of the bar, near a pool table and a TV cycling through advertisements for beer that the bar itself probably didn’t have enough money to serve. One of the familiar faces in the crowd, a burly woman named Amity who had more hair on her chest than Jake had on his whole body, reached out to slap his back in greeting. “Long time no see!” she exclaimed cheerfully, smiling warmly in a way few people who had seen and done what she had could. “What’ve you been up to Jakey? We missed you!”

Jake doubted how much many of the people there had truly missed him, but Amity at least he knew genuinely cared. They had been injured in the same mission, but she had never seemed too bothered by the fact that from the shoulder down her left arm could only make a few, predetermined movements. “Not much,” Jake admitted, clapping a hand on Amity’s shoulder warmly. “I went job hunting for a bit, but you know how it is.” She nodded sagely, before a wide smile broke out over her face again.

“You up for a challenge tonight?” She asked, mischief twinkling in her eyes. “One of the new boys thought he could out drink you. I told him that was a bet he couldn’t win, but he won’t believe it ‘till he sees it with his own eyes.” Jake wouldn’t have been surprised to hear that he appeared almost predatory when he nodded.

A few dozen shots later and the kid was passed out, the crowd was that much drunker, and Jake was properly and thoroughly buzzing with the sort of lightness he hadn’t felt in a long time. “Jake! Jake! Jake! Jake!” The crowd around him chanted and cheered while he balanced on the back wheels of his chair, wobbling slightly and making the splash of liquid in the shot glass on his head slosh back and forth. A minute more, and he slammed the drink down, his front wheels hitting the ground hard enough to jostle him. A chorus of cheers went up, and Jake felt an unfamiliar, sincere grin on his face.

Behind him, another voice cheered, tiny and metallic sounding next to the speakers blaring music. “Gooooooooaaaaaaaal!” It screamed, and Jake wasn’t sure whether it was being facetious or if it belonged to someone who was genuinely that excited about this goal. He turned to the screen, his eyes darkening as he watched the soccer game progress. It was the world cup, and in an instant the men running on the screen, their powerful legs pumping like gazelles’, had made the expression of joy fall from his face.

“Jake,” Jake jumped a little, his head whipping to the side to face Amity’s ruddy cheek. “Don’t let it get to ya,” the large woman advised, her words slurring slightly with the drinks she’d had.

His jaw tensing, Jake turned away again. “I don’t want your pity,” he said, voice colder than Amity deserved. He knew that his friend’s face would be falling, the usually cordial expression replaced by one of drunk-induced open hurt, but he didn’t allow himself to look.

Instead, his eyes fell on a couple standing near the bar. Everyone else in the area had their gazes turned away from the scene, their adamant refusal to look making it even more ostentatious. The man was standing close to the woman, her back bowed into a parenthesis against the counter as her head leaned away from where his loomed. It might have seemed intimate, if not for the way his finger jammed at her face, her argument against whatever he had said interrupted by a blow that nearly sent her to the floor.

Without thinking about it Jake was off, a path through the crowd seeming to almost open before him. The man had sat the woman down now, and was smiling at the bartender behind the counter with all the friendliness of a man who hadn’t just condemned his girlfriend to a week of painful bruises and heavy makeup. Jake wasn’t sure what he was feeling when he gripped the leg of the bar stool, pulling it out from other the man and sending him to the floor, but when he followed the man down and sent a punch into his face there was nothing but adrenaline in him, a pure rush he had missed.

He couldn’t win the fight, of course. He knew it from the moment he felt the woman’s hands on his shirt, pulling hard enough to leave him open to attacks from the man. Eventually, two bouncers came over to help, picking Jake up bodily, but not before he managed a few good hits. Jake laughed loudly as they carried him out, the mirthless sound making his pounding ribcage ache.

The back alley behind the bar was colder than he remembered the outside being that evening. The bouncers tossed him carelessly into the alley, as though he were so many empty cans of beer. Rain trickled down from above, dripping through layers of the city to finally rest beside his face in greasy, dark puddles. Another laugh nearly broke through Jakes lips as he lay face down on damp concrete, but his wheelchair, tossed out after him, drove the breath from his body when it hit his back, bouncing to lay beside the wall.

In a moment Jake had flipped himself, laying on his back in the alley. His hair was already moist from the rain, it’ dark locks sticking to his forehead and neck. “I hope you realize you’ve just lost a customer!” He called, voice straining, but the only answer was a slam of the door behind him. “Candy ass bitch,” he panted.

After the noise of the bar the alley seemed strangely quiet. The pitter patter of rain was almost gentle, an the maglev trains high above moved nearly silent through the night. The glowing shapes of advertisements that nearly formed a ceiling over the sky with their overlapping colors were a mime show above him, and when he blinked the rainwater from his eyes he swore he could hear his eyelashes brush against his cheeks.

“If it ain’t rainin’ we ain’t trainin’!” The call took all his breath to say, but a small chuckle escaped after it even so. His old drill instructor had seemed so cruel at first, when he was still a kid dreaming big dreams. Now, he wished the man had been a little harsher on him.

“That doesn’t look like him.” Jake heard a voice from down the alley. His head flopped to the side, so he could see the two pairs of dress shoes and matching black pants approach.

“It’s him.” another voice answered, leaving no room for debate. Jake squinted upwards to make out two men in suits, their features the bland sort of threatening that movies loved to use for FBI agents and companies loved to use to for real life agents. On a small transparent tablet one held, Jake’s eyes glared outwards, his hair cut military short.

“It’s him,” the other repeated, leaving no room for further debate. “You Jake Sully?”

The sheer irony of asking him that after what he’d just said made Jake smile again. “Step off,” he said dismissively, not caring about the slur in his words or the way he lay prone before two men who would likely not think much of beating him bloody. “You’re ruining my good mood.” In the background the rain continued to fall, drip by drip.

“It’s about your brother.” The man’s voice was an ugly knife through the sounds of the night. Jake felt his heart freeze in his chest; nothing good ever came from a sentence like that.


	2. Death

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A little filler chapter to get from Jake-On-Earth to Jake-On-Pandora. I might edit this later to make it longer, because honestly I'd love for more information to have been given on what Jake's last bit of time on Earth was like, but I'm experiencing a bit of writer's block and wanted this to get posted so we could move on with the plot :"") enjoy!

The crematorium was lit with the sort of cheap florescent lighting that seemed to cast more shadow than it dispelled. Despite the heavy duty air purifiers Jake could hear buzzing high on the walls, the place was permeated with a bitter smell, something unlike any pollution he’d had the displeasure of breathing before. The walls reflected the sounds of the workers in their black uniforms bringing corpse after corpse to its final resting place like funhouse mirrors, disorienting him.

It felt wrong somehow, when one of the suits shouted and shattered the strange auditory illusion, “We’re looking for Sully, T.” The hallway seemed to stretch forever, lending the words a hollow echo.

“He’s here,” one of the attendants said, his voice muffled through the gas mask that rendered him an anonymous, strangely insectoid figure in his shiny rubber apron and gloves. A careless wave of the hand as he walked past indicated a cardboard coffin lying on a metal gurney, and Jake had the morbid thought that it didn’t seem a very comfortable final resting place.

Jake rolled up to the cold metal table, his stomach clenching as he went. He could feel the heaviness in his cheeks, weighing his mouth into a neutral line the way it had earlier in the day, when he’d been told he should give up on walking. Tommy had said the same thing, though with kinder intentions; he had said that Jake needed to give up the past and look to the future, that legs as withered as his couldn’t weigh him down forever. They hadn’t talked since that day, nearly three months ago. Jake wondered now if they had stayed in touch, would this night have ended any differently?

The attendant was businesslike and brisk in his movements as he opened the coffin’s lid, pulling back the plastic sheet to reveal Jake’s own face staring back at him. Jake inhaled sharply. “Jesus, Tommy.” It looked almost as though he might be sleeping. Remembering what the suits had said in the ride over, about the alleyway and a desperate man with a knife and no training, it was hard to believe that Tommy was really dead, done in by bad luck.

It was with a coldness similar to both shock and death that Jake watched the lid close over his brother’s face again, the attendant holding out a clipboard with one of those pieces of legal ass-covering on it. Something about the family consenting to the cremation, etcetera. Jake didn’t bother reading the details before he signed.

“Your brother represented a significant investment,” began one of the suits standing behind him. “We’d like to talk to you about taking over his contract.”

“And since your genome is identical to his,” added the other, “you could step into his shoes.” A conspicuous pause followed, just long enough that Jake could laugh a silent, mirthless laugh to himself. “So to speak.” The wheelchair was always an afterthought to the corporate types, wasn’t it.

“It’d be a fresh start,” he said, “on a new world. You could do something important; you could make a difference.” A difference, like joining the army had made, like getting your life blown to shrapnel shreds had made.

Contracts, Jake wanted to tell them, were just as worthless as any other piece of paper when your only remaining family was lying dead on a table, being placed into a cold metal box about to be heated to levels comparable to what hell might be like. But the words stuck in his throat, and his tongue seemed glued to the roof of his mouth.

“The pay is good,” this last bit of wisdom from the suits made Jake’s blood run cold.

“Very good,” the other confirmed, at last proving to Jake that the RDA must have really found a way to remove any sympathetic tendencies in its henchmen.

Still, Jake couldn’t help but think. There was nothing for him here, nothing but a few people more broken and isolated than they would admit and a world that hated him almost as much as it hated itself. Back when he was younger, a kid with dreams of greatness, his parents had called him and Tommy the “egghead and the jarhead,” but who was to say that he couldn’t, in this one way, take Tommy’s place? He would never be a scientist, true, but that didn’t seem to matter much to the suits. And truly, any mission at all was better than the endless waiting game that earth had become for him.

As the flames of the incinerator lit Jake’s face, lights flashing without warmth through the heavily insulated wall, Jake could feel his mouth, which had recently begun to feel as though it was made of stone, crack. “Alright,” he said, hardly sure what he was saying, and less sure if he meant it. “Why not?”

\----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

A week before Jake was due to leave on the ISV Venture Star, a pompous name for a pompous mission, Jake found himself sitting at a table in a small, run down cafe near his home. It was quiet, with only a couple of customers and baristas milling about, so when a voice called to Jake from his left he jumped slightly in surprise. The booming laugh that followed his reaction told him exactly who it was who had managed to track him down.

“Jake!” Amity exclaimed, sitting down opposite him at the table as though she had every right to be there. “What’s this I hear about you ditching ‘lil ol’ me for a far off world?” Jake rolled his eyes at her puppy dog pout.

“You know exactly what this is,” Jake said, sipping his hot, black coffee. “It’s what Tommy would have wanted, after all.” His tone was flat, the explanation perfectly practiced after so many repetitions. He was pretty sure he could answer the question even if he were brain dead, at this point.

But Amity shook her head, her normally bright features darkening into seriousness. When her face fell out of its usual smile, the scars on it stood out more. “You and I both know it’s not,” she said, a small smile sneaking back as she continued. “You’ve got your eye on those Na’vi aliens don’t you? I knew you had a soft spot for tall girls.”

Jake choked on his swallow of coffee, laughing even while he was trying to hack up the bitter drink. “Not, urk, not funny!” He protested, knowing very well it was.

Amity’s smiling eyes said that she knew it too. “You know, I had an ex who went up there a while back. Her name was Trudy,” her eyes took on a far away look, her smile becoming wistful. “Wonder if she left me for those blue alien chicks too.”

Jake shook his head, reaching out to gently cuff Amity on the side of the head. “You and I both know she didn’t,” he said wryly. “She did it to get richer than God, it’s the only reason anyone goes out there.”

Amity eyed Jake shrewdly. “And is that why you’re going too?”

The forced nonchalance in Jake’s shrug was obvious even to him. “With that much money, I can do whatever I want when I get back,” he pointed out, avoiding her eyes.

“Yes,” Amity admitted, though there was something dark in her voice. “And you could get yourself a spinal.” Jake didn’t answer but to clench his teeth and look at the floor.

“Jake,” Amity said, and now she was reminding him too much of late nights in bombed out buildings in South America, of drunken talks that bared too much. “You aren’t broken. It ain’t your legs that needs fixing.” She sighed quietly, a noise that was almost imperceptible even for Jake, who knew her so well. “Not any more than it’s my arm.”

At last, Jake steeled himself and met her gaze. There was something unbearably soft there, but Jake had to be able to say this to her face. “The last person who told me that died in a gutter,” he said, and was proud to hear no tremble at all.

“Doesn’t mean he was wrong.” Jake blinked, and Amity stood up suddenly, smiling down at him with the same friendly smile she always used. “I’m actually busy, but I wanted to stop by one last time before you leave. I’m gonna miss you, Jake.”

Jake continued blinking in confusion, trying to process what exactly Amity had meant by what she’d said. “I’ll miss you too!” He called after her at last, but the cafe door was already swinging closed behind her. None of the other customers even looked up.

\----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The RDA aerospace-port was the single most expensive building Jake had ever been in. Every piece of it reeked of money, from the state of the art massage chairs lining the hallways to the fact that one of the stores near the terminals sold flavored oxygen. The attendants were all pretty in the bland, forgettable way that people whose faces were more plastic than flesh tended to be these days. Picking your smile from a chart defeated the purpose of a smile, in Jake’s opinion.

Interstellar flights, rare as they were, still received an entire wing of the aerospace-port for themselves, a testament to how much money pandora was making the RDA. There was a name for companies like the RDA, who bought their way into more hearts than any government could ever win with patriotism, but Jake could never seem to remember it. Still, it sent a shiver up his spine to see the people scurrying about the building, most of them wearing clothing that cost more than Jake had earned in his entire life.

At least, he reflected, the ISV Venture Star itself would not be such a nightmare. Its crew was richer than entire countries, true, but they were all scientists or retired military, utilitarian in their desires and goals. None of them would spend over a million dollars for a pair of shoes, Jake was sure of that. Though, he supposed it didn’t matter much when you were in cryosleep for years at a time.

Now that was a thought. In a few hours, Jake would get on the most advanced piece of technology on the planet, and promptly fall asleep. The next time he awoke, it would be nearly seven years from now, and to the knowledge that he was now on the most advanced pice of technology in the galaxy. It was enough to make him almost have second thoughts.

Sitting in the clean, black and white terminal, Jake knew it was too late to pull out. He had already taken care of what he’d needed to, gotten a haircut and sold his meager belongings. He rubbed a palm along his scalp, feeling the velvety bristles of new growth. The last time his hair had been this short, he had been learning how to live with two useless lumps of meat where legs used to be. This time, he would be learning to live in a new body altogether. Somehow, he thought he might be more qualified for the job than the other people all sitting in seats on either side of him. With their nervous, excited faces, they seemed more ready to go on vacation than go to space.

Before very long, a voice came on the PA, announcing the ending of the Venture Star’s preparations. Jake took a deep breath, gripped the wheels of his chair hard, and pushed forward. It didn’t matter if he was going to regret it; he’d already drawn his hand. Now he just needed to play as smart as he could, and hope.


End file.
